“Top websites and Internet service providers around the world, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai, and Limelight Networks, joined together with more than 1000 other participating websites in World IPv6 Day for a successful global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6,” reports Internet Society (ISOC) in its day after news release on World IPv6 Day held on Wednesday, Jun 8.

“During World IPv6 Day organized by the Internet Society, nearly 400 participating organizations enabled IPv6 on their main services for 24 hours on 8 June. … A key goal of World IPv6 Day was to expose potential issues with real-world IPv6 use under controlled conditions. Given the diversity of technology that powers the Internet, the global nature of the trial was crucial to identify unforeseen problems. The vast majority of users were able to access services as usual, but in rare cases, users experienced impaired access to participating websites during the trial.”

“After reflecting on the data from IPv6 day, the phrase the best comes to mind is: “Wagon’s Ho!” It’s going to be a long hard slog to IPv6-Land. Yesterday’s IPv6 flag day looks to have been a success. After a decade of implementation work by the infrastructure vendors in building towards IPv4 functional parity, combined with the months of preparation by the content and service providers in constructing the routing and namespace frameworks, IPv6 day came off successfully. For a 24 hour period starting at midnight UTC, anyone with IPv6 access connectivity could get to some of the largest content providers’ data through their v6 stacks. With six of our customers’ help, we were able to get a glimpse into some of the details of the day.”

“We saw over 1 million users reach us over IPv6. We’re pleased that we did not see any increase in the number of users seeking help from our Help Center. The estimated 0.03% of users who may have been affected would have experienced slow page loads during the test. Based on the encouraging results, we’ve decided to leave our Developer site dual-stacked, supporting both IPv4 and IPv6. And we will continue to adapt our entire code base and tools to support IPv6.”

Both the European exchange points providing IPv6-specific traffic reports showed an increase in IPv6 traffic on World IPv6 Day. AMS-IX showed a a small increase (peaking at 2.9Gbs), but may not be statiscally significant. Based on looking at the year-to-date IPv6 traffic, it looks like the jump in IPv6 traffic started in February 2011 with an increase in peak usage from around 1.8Gbs to around 2.6Gbs. That roughly matches up with the time of the IANA IPv4 free pool exhaustion. DE-IX showed a marked increase in traffic appearing to at lease double its previous reports. It seems clear the community that used DE-IX was using the day to learn more about IPv6.

The world IPv6 day is finally here. Several large organizations are participating. Google is now responding with an IPv6 address for www.google.com when you ask their DNS forcing clients to try IPv6 prior to IPv4.

World IPv6 Day will allow us to better understand how our infrastructure and code perform under IPv6 while minimizing impact on our users. Since January, we’ve conducted several studies and tests of our own and have gained even greater confidence that our site is ready for IPv6. We anticipate that 99.97% of users will not be affected at all. The small number of users who may be affected may find that pages are slow to load and we are working to minimize the impact.

Of course, we will be prepared to address any issues as they come up. Our Help Center has instructions and more information for users who may be affected.

We are encouraged by the overwhelming response of the hundreds of major organizations who have signed up to participate on World IPv6 Day.

Erion is pleased to announce that we are running some of our world-leading IPv6 training courses as public events in London UK during July 2011.

On the 4th July we are running our 1-day Introduction to IPv6 which is a comprehensive technical overview of IPv6. From the 5th to the 8th July we are running our flagship 4-day Implementing IPv6 course. Developed over 13 years, this course covers all aspects of IPv6 in comprehensive detail and is ideal for all technical staff wishing to learn more about IPv6. Delegates have the option to chose to carry out hands-on exercises on Linux, Cisco IOS or Windows.

Erion is the world’s leading provider of IPv6 training. We have the largest portfolio of IPv6 training courses, suitable for all audiences, covering all aspects of IPv6 on all major operating systems and platforms. In addition to our public IPv6 training schedule, we also provide IPv6 training as on-site courses and we provide Erion Modular IPv6 Training which allows for a bespoke training programme to be created based on our hundreds of IPv6 training modules.For further information please contact us on +44 (0)1422 207000, [email protected] or through our web-site contact form.

RIPE Labs graph looks at IPv6 RIPEness rate of all countries in the RIPE NCC service region as measured in May 2011. (Click to Enlarge)A year ago, the RIPE NCC introduced IPv6 RIPEness — a system that rates IPv6 deployment of Local Internet Registries (LIRs) based on the following criteria:

27% of all LIRs (6,748 at the time) had IPv6 address space (one star), and

8% of all LIRs (or a total of 540) had all four stars

Now, one year later, the numbers have gone up:

41% of all LIRs have IPv6 address space, and

13% have all four stars

In absolute numbers: more than 3,000 LIRs have IPv6 address space. This means that the RIPE NCC has made more than 1,100 IPv6 allocations within 12 months.

It is also interesting to look at the development in some countries:

Slovenia is still the winner: More than 80% of all LIRs in that country have an IPv6 allocation, and almost half of them have all four stars

Armenia is now second on the list: 72% of all LIRs have an IPv6 allocation (45% last year)

You might notice that some countries that had at least one or two stars previously now show no IPv6 RIPEness anymore. This is due to mergers or closures of LIRs in these countries and does not mean that IPv6 address space has been returned or revoked.

Even though we are happy to see progress, many LIRs have not yet requested IPv6 address space from the RIPE NCC. We hope that the IPv6 RIPEness system is helping to encourage LIRs to deploy IPv6. Note that all LIRs that reach all four stars receive free t-shirts and now also an IPv6-enabled fridge magnet from the RIPE NCC :)